equently missing from this burgeoning discourse, however, are contributions by archaeologists, and historical archaeologists in par-ticular,6 as well as conscious attempts to study this region’s past from an interdisciplinary perspective. A recent special edition of the journal Slavery and Abolition demonstrates that some historians are increas-ingly aware of the potential insights that the study of material culture in archaeological contexts can provide,7 an awareness matched by a grow-ing appreciation among some archaeologists of the value of “text-aided” archaeology.8 Despite such developments, concerted efforts to cultivate interdisciplinary approaches to individual research projects and, ulti-mately, to academic disciplines remain tangential at best. This book seeks to begin the process of creating a more explicitly interdisciplinary approach to Indian Ocean studies by drawing on the expertise of the archaeologists, historians, artists, and anthropologists who participated in the workshop Connecting Continents: Case Stud-ies from the Indian Ocean World held at Stanford University in March 2014.